An Illusion of Love
by webbedfeet
Summary: In the aftermath of the Battle of Mohacs, a traumatized Elizabeth--Hungary--lies bleeding on the battlefield, waiting for morning, death, and perhaps the boy she loved. Austria/Hungary UST?


**A/N + Disclaimer** : Set in the aftermath of the Battle of Mohacs, where Hungary lost a critical battle to the Ottoman Empire and also its king. Afterwards, Ferdinand I of the Hapsburg family laid claim to the Hungarian throne, marking the end of Hungary's history as a powerful, old, independent nation. Also, the characters belong to Hidekaz, the nations belong to their people(s), all similiarities coincidental, etc.

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**An Illusion of Love**

At the last moments of the day, Elizabeth opened her eyes to a sky thundering with the beats of a thousand wings. Some of them sounded large enough to enfold a grow stallion, some sounded barely larger than a cat, all of them scratching, beating, clumsily grazing the currents of the air. They'd make one sonorous choir, she thought, her mind running only fast enough to measure the pauses between her breaths. There were caws, and the sound of stretching things, pulpy things, metallic things. And once the smells came; bloody things, burning things, dying things, and underneath her body and the bodies below her the fragrance of struggling grass and flowers, somewhere beyond that, a faint, watery tang. So she was near a river. Perhaps even the one she loved, a bright blue ribbon whose name would not come to her. She'd taken the children of her masters down to it for each and every year she'd been alive, boys and girls who were most likely dead now. The last had sported a reddish-brown hair and curious eyes. She was certain he was dead, too.

"He said a war would be better. I knew I could fight," Elizabeth said, hoping somebody would hear. She could fight, fought and burned and killed and laughed and protected the descendants of the first humans she loved. Only the beating of wings answered her.

Something blotted out the waning sun, and she blinked, unsure what it could be. It took a few moments for her to realize that she'd just raised her hands to her face, and it was the shadow of ten bloody fingers that hid away the sky. There were numerous cuts; small cuts, bigger ones, ones that bled and ones that didn't, others that had started to swollen. Fresh blood running, dried blood clotting, open gashes along the sides of her arms that offered thin glimpses of bone. These bled profusely and she wondered how on earth she could hold her hands up that high. Those were her lance hands, she remembered, for fighting and riding and killing, among other things, but she also knew those wounds were not from the battle itself. There were soldiers wearing the bronze and leather caps of Suleiman's armies and she was unhorsed. Then there were swords and maces and mud and she'd never reached the man she came here to fight, the man who ended up giving her all these wounds. The ones that lasted. Like those on her thighs, three years ago and still yet to be healed. She'd came to fight him for this, not to win but simply to heal these wounds, and this was how she ended up : staring at the sky bleeding while everything around her went on to die, each cut on her body for a hundred Hungarian dead.

Above, between the shadows of her fingers, a few stars had winked into life. It would be sometime until anyone came for her, Elizabeth decided, and even longer until she could walk on her own, let alone make Sadiq pay what he owed her. A liquid thing still burned inside her belly and she knew he was still in here, to rob and rape and pillage. She wished he'd go away already. He didn't bring enough troops to stay here in the first place, not enough men to keep her down without fighting back. He would have to go. Soon. Soon.

As if it would make the time go faster, she closed her eyes and started counting. The number of imaginary stars, the years she'd lived, the number of flowers in her meadows, deers in her mountains, lightnings in her storms. Counting makes everything goes faster, said a boy who loved mathematics and made it an art, and perhaps she'd stolen glances at him, trying to remember all the ways he can look without ever letting him see. What year was it? Count the time. How long was it? Count the memories. The smell of bloody water filled her, this river she perhaps loved, intense enough to drown out the sky and the shadows and everything else. He said, count the waves. On the banks of the river where reeds and purple immortelle bloomed. So she started counting, the waves, the bodies floating, the times she'd ran upon its banks as a heathen girl.

She remembered what the boy chose to call himself. They'd met the first time on the banks of the river, him coming down in a sailboat to see if there were new lands to conquer, new places for his limbs to grow. Elizabeth still knew the language of horses then, and she watched him with curiosity and wariness. It was another kind of time. They seldom met others of their kind, and each meeting felt like a strange testing of unseen borders. They tentatively push boundaries where they thought they could and bloodied the others when they wanted what they must.

"Roderich," she whispered. She had loved the sound of his name.

On the riverbank he'd squinted at her in response to her stare, and she noticed how his boat smelled like wildflowers on the Alps. Then the boat was gone. If anything passed between them in that moment, it was a quiet acknowledgment that one day they may kill each other, and that was all. He was an upstart of sorts who was grown in the middle of a noble house and became what he was without ever learning how to start a campfire, and she was an old roving marauder trying to figure out how to defend a home.

She didn't want to know if she wanted him to come. And now that it was all over, she'll never know what she wanted.

Elizabeth let her hands drop and the shadows of her fingers fell away. A burning sky promptly showed itself. It was almost night, and somewhere on the mountains between their borders, Roderich would make his vulture's vigil. He wouldn't have came so far normally, the roads were treacherous and unfamiliar simply because they were not his. Nobody goes anywhere very often unless they wanted to claim a piece of space for themselves, to grow and fill up lakes and songs. Perhaps he was here for that, too : Roderich's master was married to the sister of her master. It would be enough claim, for the humans. Perhaps he would be here to say all her plains and mountains were his and remove her name from the last graveyards of the world.

And she would stay here and sleep. Whole rivers of stars would spill from the sky and there would be too many to count. They would shine on the blue of her beautiful river, the red of her putrefying children. And somewhere on the mountains Roderich would wait for her to die, counting the hours on long white fingers that played the loveliest songs nobody ever named. He had done the same thing when the Tartars came, when he promised to help, and she knew he would do it over and over again until the day they were all dead and forgotten.

Roderich had always waited for her. And she knew he always will.

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He always remembered the times he watched her, counted them like an absent-minded bard trying to recall the bars of his tunes. The times she sang like a choked horse and laughed like a goddess of the wilderness, the way she bled and cried and fought her way back to glory again. He didn't know her best, she was too wild for that; she was not the biggest thing in his life, she was too small and honest for that. But he remembered the way she smelled of hay and summer and the fog that colored the Danube blue when she was there, knew he could only watch her freedom and try to follow it in his symphonies.

And he watched the day darkening and the bloody air turning to mist and listened to the sound of her breathing in the rustling of the reeds. Thoughts flitted into his mind that didn't stay; Louis was dead and Ferdinand was not fool enough to not take advantage of that. It was the way things went. He could only watch her die, kill her, or destroy the very thing that made her laughter so hard to describe.

And he was not fool enough to let her die.

Elizabeth would wake up. Then it would be dawn. Then day. Then night. Then the world would turn. There will be more wars and historians would keep writing the accounts of their personal lives. They will find this a constant, to have and hold for another thousand years.

For now, Roderich sat down besides Elizabeth's sleeping form and counted the stars. He had searched for her among the ruins of Buda's dead, and now that he'd found her, there was no hurry. He would wait for words to come to him and time to come to her. The night was long and luminous. That was all the time he needed.

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End file.
